Word: turkana
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...twin-prop touched down at a remote bush landing strip at Kimanjo, deep in Laikipia. From there it was a Land Cruiser ride to our first camp, set beneath acacia and a vast sycamore fig. Here we met the troop in its full glory: 19 camels and 15 Samburu, Turkana and Masai tribesmen. The sense of joining an ancient caravan heading into the bush was heightened by the fact that there would be almost no contact with the outside world for several days...
Many of Africa's conflicts can be explained as tinderboxes that had long been waiting for a spark. In northern Kenya, Turkana tribes and armed gangs murder and rob each other in a cycle of violence fuelled by eight years of drought. In Rwanda, there is an increasing consensus that Africa's other recent genocide is at least partly understood as a contest between too many people on too little cultivable land. The U.N. Development Program predicted as long ago as November 1999 that one in two Africans would face water shortages by 2025, and said it expected violent flashpoints...
There are exceptions. As a UNICEF ambassador, he made trips to Uganda and Kyrgyzstan. After shooting The Constant Gardener in Kenya, he helped producer Simon Channing-Williams set up a fund to build a school near and clean up Lake Turkana, where the film's climactic scene is set. But even though the novel deals with the exploitation of Africa by the governments and drug companies of the "civilized world," Fiennes insists he was not looking to make a political film. "It was only when I saw the film in its first cut that I thought, 'This is about Africa...
Like other members of the famous "hominid gang," the sharp-eyed fossil hunters employed by paleontology's Leakey family, Justus Erus spends three months a year scouring the dry, bone-rich riverbeds around Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya. It is a scrubby, desolate landscape, where the people are desperately poor and gun-toting young men are a menacing presence. But it is hallowed ground to scientists because of the clues it offers to early human history. Still, even after five years, Erus, a 30-year-old Turkana tribesman, had scored nary a hit--just bits of ancient animal bones...
...spent some of the most exciting days of my life working on the eastern shores of Kenya's Lake Turkana, searching for the fossilized remains of our early ancestors. We did not always find what we wanted, but every day there was much more to discover than the traces of our own predecessors. The fossils, some quite complete, others mere fragments, spoke of another world in which the ancestors of many of today's African mammals roamed the rich grasslands and forest fringes between 1.5 million and 2 million years ago. The environment was not too different from the wetter...